J.D. Barker & Dacre Stoker: Dracul

Dracul was a wonderfully Gothic read that includes many of the elements that we know from Dracula, the original story and the adaptations.

However, this re-assembling of the different elements of the Dracula story, unfortunately, did not work for me: the familiar elements somehow just felt old when in Dracula they felt novel.

And the inclusion of Stoker himself and his family in the story of Dracul, just did not work for me, even if there are some interesting twists with respect to the motivation of the “undead”.

I’d this is more a fault in this reader than it is of the book. I just have never done well with fiction that tries to hard to come across as “historical fiction”, even less so with fiction that tries to come across as “faction”.

I also struggled with the writing itself, which at times felt gimmicky, overwrought, and not particularly of its time. I.e. if this was supposed to be a prequel to Dracula, I would have expected a closer resemblance to the language used in Dracula. This is a minor quibble, tho. My main issue was that I was just bored for about 250 pages until the conclusion of the story.